For the press pack gathered outside the high court it's been a bit of an up-and-down sort of week. The stars of the multi-million-pound McCartney divorce may rarely be bothering to show up in the flesh, but one other character is, fortunately, very much at the scene of battle. Mohamed Al Fayed has stepped into the breach - as he so often does.

Fayed's claims that the royal family colluded with Scotland Yard, MI6, the French secret service and top doctors on both sides of the Channel to assassinate Di and Dodi have been sustained for more than 10 years now, pushing them beyond self-publicity and into an altogether darker place of obsession and paranoia. He is clearly still grieving intensely.

And yet his evidence at the inquest - while as long-winded, rambling and incomprehensible as the extremely expensive inquest itself - has proved the most entertaining story of the week. Admittedly his facts were a little awry. Calling Prince Philip a racist Nazi is one thing - the Duke of Edinburgh's sisters were all married to German aristocrats with Nazi sympathies, including one who served as Himmler's personal SS aide, and Wikipedia alone lists 20 on-the-record racist comments, from the infamous "slitty eyes" to asking a black businessman if he still threw spears. But thinking the prince's original name was Frankenstein? How could he confuse Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg with a tale of crazed gothic horror?

Fayed's own account of his past differs so widely from Tom Bower's unauthorised biography that when he was cross-examined during Neil Hamilton's libel appeal, he had to check his passport to determine his own date of birth. But there's something so weird and wonderful about his schemes - something so noisy, blatant and enjoyable - that you almost forgive them instantly.

Yes, OK, he paid Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith to ask questions for him in the House of Commons. But he did so with cash. In brown envelopes. And then told the media. His Paris hotel's role in confirming that Jonathan Aitken's two-night stay was paid for by arms dealer Prince Mohammed bin Fahd pretty much put the final nail in the coffin of John Major's government - and proved a bit of a relief for this paper as well, if we are to declare an interest. Compared to the money for honours, complex loans from faceless overseas backers, undeclared payments and backroom deals done with deadly discretion in parliament and local councils across the land, this seems to belong to a more innocent age.

Journalists like to make much of Fayed's Cairo upbringing to explain his behaviour. But when he arrived in London in 1974 he befriended the Mayfair set - Tiny Rowland, Lord Lucan, James Goldsmith and the founder of the SAS, David Stirling, who was busy creating the rightwing paramilitary organisation GB75. When Fayed bought Harrods from under Rowland's nose, the outraged Rowland persuaded the Thatcher government to mount a DTI investigation in an attempt to reverse the deal. Fayed didn't need an Egyptian bazaar education to realise the British ruling class is a bit dodgy.

Hopefully his grandiose showboating will continue long after his death. When I walked around Harrods with him last year for an interview, he pointed out the Egyptian escalator - where his face is on four figures on every floor. "I'm building a glass pyramid over the Egyptian escalator where my body will be mummified, so my customers can see me forever," he declared proudly. "It's a listed monument, so they can't take me away. They can't."

It may well be that the authorities refuse permission for the whole mummification thing, just as he has been refused a British passport all these years. As oligarchs arrive trailing dollars and bodies across a grateful London, as British mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians in the street, and as our civil liberties drain silently away, we have to question our own moral authority in refusing that passport on the grounds of his good character.

This man makes the royal family seem nearly normal, and entertains us more than our professional entertainers. He may be a self-aggrandising eccentric of dubious provenance but, by God, that's the British national dream. He's practically a national treasure, so let's give him the passport in thanks for all the fun. Because after what he said in court this week, I suspect that putting him on the honours list might be a bit of a problem.